Johnny Cash, Eighties Man

Johnny Cash has been rehabilitated before. There were the stints in actual rehab programs during his life, for drinking and drugs. There was spiritual rehabilitation, occasioned by his marriage, in 1968, to June Carter, an event and idea fixed in recent cultural history by the movie “Walk the Line.” And there have been several musical rehabilitations, most vitally in the series of American Recordings albums that returned Cash to critical and commercial success in the last two decades of his life, recorded under the firm-handed guidance of the producer Rick Rubin. Now, another attempt at musical rehab is underway with the release of a collection of lost songs, most of which were recorded in 1984 and have been assembled under the title “Out Among the Stars.” Johnny Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, is trying to redeem his father’s lost decade.

When fans of Cash think of 1984, it is normally with a wince. Cash was angry at his record label, Columbia (then owned by CBS), for what he considered neglect, and released a parody single called “Chicken in Black,” which, well…its premise is that, after receiving a brain transplant, Cash turns into a bank robber called the Manhattan Flash. His discarded brain, meanwhile, is given to a chicken, who becomes a minor musical draw. (Making things worse, there was a music video.) In his second autobiography, Cash called the song “intentionally atrocious” and added: “I was burlesquing myself and forcing CBS to go along with it.” Underneath its silliness, the song, written for Cash by Gary Gentry, offers a surprisingly pointed mix of self-ridicule and lashing out against the business: Cash is told by a doctor that “Your body’s outlived your brain”; he resorts to plain thievery to make a dollar; everyone just wants to hear the old hits. And its message is sad: the Man in Black had turned yellow.

But this version of the story presents a familiar problem in music history: it is perfectly compelling but not quite true. Robert Hilburn, in his recent biography of Cash, writes that Cash was initially enthusiastic about the song—both he and the studio hoped that they had a hit on their hands. And the funny thing (perhaps cruelly funny from Cash’s later perspective) is that it was a hit, spending eleven weeks on the country charts—better than anything else he’d done in years. But after hearing the song and seeing the video, his friends and family were aghast. The year before, Cash had spent forty-three days at Betty Ford; perhaps they thought he’d become a bit unhinged. Waylon Jennings told him, quite correctly, that he looked like a fool in the video. Embarrassed, Cash renounced the song and refused to play it in concert. Later, in his own revision, “Chicken in Black” went from being an eager stab at relevance to a stealthy form of goofball protest. Regardless, two years after the song’s release, Cash was dropped by Columbia and dispatched to the music wilderness—until, in the early nineties, sobriety and Rick Rubin saved him.

It is a bit mean-spirited to dwell on “Chicken in Black” in connection with “Out Among the Stars.” Yet most of the tracks on the new record, which is being released with the full weight and seriousness that anything related to Johnny Cash now commands, were recorded around the same time, and under the guidance of the same producer, Billy Sherrill. A pioneer of a soft-focus, emotive style of pop-country dubbed “countrypolitan,” Sherrill had produced hits like “The Grand Tour,” for George Jones, and “Behind Closed Doors,” for Charlie Rich. In 1981, he was paired with Johnny Cash for “The Baron,” a leaden and forgettable record. Of the collaboration, Cash said, “But by the time I got to him and he got to me, we were both pretty cynical.…. We tried, sort of, but we certainly didn’t give it our best.”

How much enthusiasm, then, should we have for these new songs, which were recorded with Sherrill in 1981 and 1984, but shelved by Columbia? Cash’s dismissal of this partnership contrasts sharply with the effusion of good feeling expressed by Cash’s son, John Carter, who discovered the lost recordings, some of which were unfinished, two years ago in an attic and shepherded them to their final form. In an audio commentary track on the album, he says, “We catch Dad here at a point in his life when he was true, when he was aware, when his voice was perfect, when he was heading in a spiritual direction that was positive and meaningful for him.” So what does nineteen-eighties Johnny Cash redemption sound like?

Mostly it sounds like the rest of the music he recorded in the period—a voice still in fine and arresting form, in the service of songs of wildly varying quality. The title track, about people at the ends of their ropes, plays just on the near side of schmaltz; and anyway, Cash does sound great. A bluegrass duet with June, “Don’t You Think It’s Come Our Time?,” is a flinty, romantic gem—dust gets in your eye. “I Came to Believe,” a gospel confession brought along brightly by a piano backing, is interesting mostly in comparison to Cash’s subsequent recording of the same song with Rubin, which was released posthumously on “American V: A Hundred Highways.” (That later version, death-shadowed, is mesmerizing.) The new album’s standout, “She Used to Love Me a Lot,” also evokes Cash’s later work. It’s a slow-burning lament of bitterly lost love that would have fit on one of the later Rubin albums, maybe repurposed as a stripped-down dirge.

Then there are songs that should have stayed in the attic. “After All” (with opening organ notes that sounds distressingly similar to the ones at the beginning of Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All”) is a stiff ballad that exposes Cash’s voice at a higher register. And the lyrics do no one any favors: “Our love didn’t last long / What went wrong? / Who’s to say?” The novelty song “If I Told You Who It Was,” about an unnamed female country star (“her tire, unlike her body, was very flat”), sounds like the until now blessedly lost B-side to “Chicken in Black.” “Tennessee,” a partisan anthem celebrating the state he called home, welcomes a children’s choir in at the end; this is either genius or folly, depending on your mood.

The album, on the whole, has few revelations, despite its intriguing provenance. It is nicely familiar and largely forgettable, rather than startling or essential: there are chugga-chugga train songs (“Baby Ride Easy,” a duet with June; and “Movin’ On,” the oft-covered Hank Snow number, here featuring Waylon Jennings) and mid-tempo shuffles (“Call Your Mother,” “Rock and Roll Shoes”) that will have an effect on exactly no one’s opinion of Johnny Cash.

John Carter Cash recently told the Guardian that there are perhaps four or five more albums’ worth of unreleased material from Cash’s career. He sounds thoughtful and careful about his father’s legacy, perhaps heading off discussion that these posthumous releases, including two from the Rubin sessions with perhaps more to come, are a kind of familial cash grab. Do we want to hear what else is out there? Sure, why not? Only lately have we become quite so serious and somber about Johnny Cash. His brave and beautiful final records are, of course, our most recent memory, and so shape our idea of the man. But he hosted a variety show; he sold tacos. And nearly a hundred albums have been released in his name. The question of whether the world needs another one became beside the point long ago.

But while we’re poking at history, and at the nineteen-eighties in particular, it’s worth noting that Cash’s legacy from the period may not have needed rehabilitating after all. In 1983, just a year before he made the last of the recordings featured on “Out Among the Stars,” he made an album with the producer Brian Ahern called “Johnny 99.” Cash’s voice is excellent, and save for a few throwaways, the song selection reveals an inspired, genre-crossing eccentricity. His version of the gut-wrenching Bruce Springsteen song “Highway Patrolman” has a fascinating lyrical arrangement, and benefits from nice backing vocals by Hoyt Axton. There’s a winsome duet with June, “Brand New Dance,” which Emmylou Harris later recorded. “I’m Ragged But I’m Right,” previously made famous by George Jones, is a classic hard charger. And Cash’s performance of Eric von Schmidt’s folk song “Joshua Gone Barbados” is unexpected and soulful. If you’re looking for a high point of the period, and a song that hints at Cash’s late-career rebirth, this is it. Sometimes great “lost” songs aren’t really lost at all.

Above: Johnny Cash performing at the Country Music Festival on August 1, 1980. Photograph by David Redfern/Redferns/Getty.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.